How does your team learn from each others experiences and mistakes?

The landscape of the property manager's role is constantly changing. New regulations, compliance, landlord's expectations and market conditions all require constant learning to stay current. That’s just for existing property manager, that have spent years mastering their trade. What if you are new to the industry? We have discussed in previous blogs things like induction, training and upskilling. These are usually related to core property management tasks. How to issue a work order, how to track arrears, processing lease renewals and scheduling routine inspections. There are often slight nuances between agencies, with these tasks, however they are generally similar in context.

What about all the real life events that are not in the textbook, so to speak. What do you do when a tenant continues to pay rent the day before a termination notice expires? We know we are still entitled to a tribunal hearing for a warrant, but we also know, no adjudicator will issue one while the tenant is up to date with rent. What do we do when we get to a property, during a routine inspection, and the tenant has removed the entire wall between the fourth bedroom and the garage? Or one that I get the most common questions about, what do you do when the tenant has abandoned the property and left their personal belonging behind? These are unique events that often happen only a handful of time in a property manager's career and they are rarely documented for other to learn from.

Should you or someone in your business experience one of these unique events or any other event that don’t normally appear in the “property management manual”, why not document them. Make notes about what happened, and attach any legislation that will help eliminate possible outcomes and reduce them to a couple of reasonable suggestions. Once you have these, caroul the team and share your findings. Through a collaborated effort, use the collective knowledge of the team to eliminate your decision down to one action.

Look at the people around your workplace, you have maybe three or four great team members, and between them they may have 10, possible 20 years combined experience. Use this knowledge to solve these real world problems. Once you have found a solution and successfully completed your task, document it into a case study and present it back the entire at your next team meeting. Collaboration is a powerful tool. Use it to learn and grow as a team. So much power right there.